‘An Accidental, Experimental Masterpiece’

I was walking, recently, with my physical body through a physical bookstore when — somewhere between the giant display of e-readers, the Blu-ray wing, the Wi-Fi cafe and the looming tower of interactive language software — I stumbled across an actual, physical book that stopped me cold.

The book was the The World Almanac and Book of Facts, an iconic yellow slab of lists and stats and graphs that has been, for the last century or so, holy scripture to the culture’s various ministers of information: journalists, writers of elementary-school reports, know-it-all uncles, “Jeopardy!” contestants. It promises to deliver, at the speed of print, all the world’s most important facts: the state bird of Oklahoma (the scissor-tailed flycatcher); the year Euripides was born (484 B.C.); the phone number for Gamblers Anonymous (213-386-8789); the major industries of Guyana (bauxite, sugar, rice milling, timber, textiles, gold mining). It is, in other words, basically the analog Internet — the Ghost of Search Engines Past.

Over the last decade, the almanac has been superseded, thoroughly, on just about every front. I’d assumed it had died, years ago, in the mass extinction that brought down (or mortally wounded) all of its informational cousins: the encyclopedia, the phone book, the printed dictionary, the classified ad, the paper road map and even the bookstore itself.

And yet here it was, in 2011, on an end-of-shelf display. I felt mysteriously drawn to it: amused, nostalgic, excited, touched, comforted. It felt like a possible solution to a question I hadn’t even been aware I was asking. I had a sudden desire to read it — not just to poke around in it, but to really read it, all the way through. I bought it, took it home, sat down and turned to Page 1.

The average wind speed in Albuquerque is 8.9 miles per hour. A sea lion gestates for 350 days. A first-class U.S. postage stamp costs 44 cents. The world’s worst mine disaster occurred in China in April 1942, killing 1,549 workers. The geographical center of Oregon is a place called Crook. If you are bitten by a boomslang on the African savanna, you will most likely experience nausea and dizziness, then a slight recovery, and then you may die, suddenly, from internal bleeding.

Shortly after my rediscovery of the almanac, while I was still working my way through its section on “U.S. Consumer Price Indexes for Selected Items and Groups, 1970-2009,” I started to read a new book that helped me think about why I might have become enchanted by a semidefunct reference book: “The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood,” by James Gleick. It is, as its title suggests, an idiosyncratic history of the transmission of information, from ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets and African “talking drums” to Wikipedia and quantum computing — from underload to load to overload.

Gleick leads us, one by one, through the defining leaps in information technology: the alphabet, the printing press, the logarithm, the telegraph, the telephone, the computer, the Internet. He introduces us to the English inventor Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine, an unwieldy Victorian protocomputer made of gears and cogs and wheels and shafts that Babbage promised would produce “logarithmic tables as cheap as potatoes.” We meet Claude Shannon, a mid-20th-century American engineer who invented information theory, mapped the mathematical basis of genetics, programmed a chess computer, championed the neglected science of juggling and built a maze-solving robot rat with a total memory of 75 bits.

Along the way, Gleick reminds us how much all of these different eras share. Just about every one of them, it turns out, imagined itself in the midst of an information crisis: overrun with new communication technologies that threatened to destroy the sacred essence of humanity. (These crises are almost always imagined in identical terms — artificial speed and distance threatening natural slowness and closeness.) Early critics of the telegraph, for instance, made many of the same doomsday complaints that we make today about texting and Twitter: that it would turn people into shallow thinkers and ruin writing by making everyone abbreviate everything. (To save money, telegraph users used to write in elaborate shorthand: “mhii,” for instance, meant “my health is improving.”) A few decades later, by the time people had grown to trust the telegraph, they were skeptical of a new invention: the telephone, which they argued was frivolous because — unlike the telegraph — it could carry only emotion, not facts. (Phones also made it too easy for kids to flirt.) Every leap has raised similar objections. One lesson of Gleick’s book is that, even as we devise ever-more-ingenious ways of speaking to one another, we still often have no idea what we’re talking about.

A baby oyster is called a spat. The first spam e-mail was sent in 1978. Of all the planets in our solar system, Venus has the most circular orbit. Four of the 10 wealthiest Americans are members of the family that founded Wal-Mart. The 17th-fastest-growing U.S. franchise last year was Jazzercise Inc. A group of iguanas is called a mess.

So what about our current crisis? (No matter how deeply you accept, intellectually, that your time’s crisis is probably not a crisis, it’s always going to feel like a crisis.) Given the snowballing storage capacity of computers, and the international armies of people willing to spend their days pouring data into them, modern information seems to have no boundaries. The Internet’s edges expand as we approach them. But is infinite information infinitely valuable? Or does it lead — has it already led — to the collapse of meaning, proportion, authority, value?

Gleick describes a controversy that cropped up among the citizen editors of Wikipedia. Someone proposed, as a thought experiment, writing an entry about the metal screw in the rear-left brake pad of his bicycle. This horrified some and excited others. (Wikipedia’s co-founder, Jimmy Wales, sided with the bike screw. “This is an object in space,” he said, “and I’ve seen it.”) The debate gave rise to rival factions that came to identify themselves as “deletionists” and “inclusionists.” Surely most of the energy of the culture — Google, Apple, Wikipedia — is currently behind the inclusionists.

The Web itself is an eternally unfinished monument to inclusionism — a text that aspires to be as big and involved as the world it describes. Gleick describes it as “a vast, interlocking set of databases growing asymptotically toward the ideal of All Previous Text.” Information is, at root, about control, and the Web gives us more control than we’ve ever had — but it also generates so much new information, so constantly, that it feels strangely like a lack of control. It defeats us, every single day; we could never even dream of reading everything on it. Hence the crisis. When our writing — a tool we invented to tame the world’s overwhelming abundance — itself becomes an overwhelming abundance, it’s a double crisis, a meta-crisis.

So where do we turn?

The cover of The World Almanac and Book of Facts is smiley-face yellow. In its center is a picture of the earth, with the Northern Hemisphere dominated by a giant red date-stamp — “2011” — as if the planet were also somehow the world’s largest desk calendar. The equator is blotted out by three continent-size photos meant to stand in for humanity’s achievements over the past year: Rafael Nadal hitting a face-contorting backhand; a space shuttle rising on stilts of flame; and Lady Gaga wearing a hat that looks like a Joseph Beuys installation.

Despite the almanac’s bookiness, vast portions of it are unreadable in any traditional sense. My cover-to-cover reading experiment fizzled fairly quickly. The book alternates between smoothly written big-picture narratives (“World History”; “Beginnings of the Universe”) and endless pileups of discrete facts (“Notable Waterfalls”; “Latitude and Longitude of World Cities”). It’s hard to know exactly how to process it. The scholar Benedict Anderson once wrote that “reading a newspaper is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot.” Reading the almanac is like reading a novel written by an eighth-grade cyborg. It’s like an accidental experimental masterpiece: a book designed to find the limits of bookiness.

And yet I enjoyed, very much, being inside that world. I flitted and read, flitted and read, happily for many hours. Like the Web, the almanac aspires to be a total information delivery system — the source of every datum you will ever need. Unlike the Web, however, the almanac aims for exhaustiveness within clearly defined limits. It has a front cover and a back cover. Compared with the Internet, it feels wonderfully contained and stable — it is curated omniscience, portion-control Google. Much of its value comes from the empty spaces around its edges, the missing entries in its index, the silence that descends when you close it.

In Russia, there are 163 cellphone subscriptions for every 100 people. Earl Grey was an actual man — prime minister of England from 1830 to 1834. Bob Dylan and Dick Cheney are the same age. There is (according to the Chronological List of Popes) a long tradition of “antipopes”: men who claimed, falsely, to deserve the papal crown. In the year 2099, Ash Wednesday will fall on Feb. 25.

Google gives me more than eight million hits for “information overload.” The almanac, on the other hand, has no idea what I’m talking about. Its index is silent on the subject. This is because, for The World Almanac, there is no information crisis: it’s all here. The book is a product of the late 19th century, and it radiates a 19th-century confidence, that old fiction of “everything.” This is its comfort, for us, in 2011.

Reading the almanac reminded me of the power of limits. It made me think about the value of not knowing, of ignorance, of lack of information — the dark matter of knowledge. These blank spaces, I realized, are just as important as the positive presence of information itself; they even define, in many ways, what that information can be. (Only 4 percent of our universe, the almanac tells me, is made up of visible matter.) There’s a nice analogy for this in Gleick’s book. In the early 1830s, telegraph technology was widespread: everyone knew that you could send an electric signal along a metal wire over serious distances. But no one could figure out how to use this technology, practically, to send messages to one another.

Samuel Morse’s idea was radically simple. As Gleick puts it: “The electric current flowed and was interrupted, and the interruptions could be organized to create meaning.” Note that it’s the interruptions that are organized; the information, in Morse Code, is actually the absence of current. There’s a similar insight behind binary code, which depends on ones and zeroes — the constant interruption of presence by absence. As George Boole put it, “The respective interpretation of the symbols 0 and 1 in the system of logic are Nothing and Universe.” We are so enamored, today, with our information abundance that we want presence all the time. We want a binary code made entirely of ones: universe, universe, universe.

We need to remember the value of nothing. It’s like breathing: you can’t inhale all day. We need to learn to make peace with the information we don’t know, to embrace the zeroes, to relearn the pleasures of hunger, need, interruption, restraint. We need to work up our ignorance muscles. We need to organize our internal absences to create meaning. We are responsible, in other words, now and forever, for our own deletionism.

A version of this article appears in print on June 26, 2011, on page MM50 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘An Accidental, Experimental Masterpiece’. Today's Paper|Subscribe